Seeds Of Potential

Every person has potential. Whether it be your gifts, talents, something you would like to be good at, even trouble, there lies potential for enhancement. In our Seeds of Potential program, we equate seeds to one’s own talents, skills, and strengths, and parallel the growth of self with the growth happening in the farm. Our students will: prepare their field and their mind, plant what we want to harvest in the garden and in our lives, cultivate and nourish what we’ve planted so our harvest can reach its highest potential, collect the harvest that we’ve created together, and enjoy fruits of our labor.

In order to accomplish our goals, Grow Orlando must also focus on the community where our students reside. At the Winter Garden Alliance meeting, we asked several of the youth what it is that they want to see in their community. They almost immediately said jobs and healthy and safe activities for the older kids. For our Seeds of Potential pilot program in Winter Garden, 5 students joined, with more students wanting to be a part of the program, but could not due to capacity. For our kick-off in January, we have 10 new students that have applied and are ready to farm! With you, we can place financial and health investments directly into our students and our community, building ‘Growth’ with residents and supporting organizations for a grassroots harvest we can all enjoy.

Alongside financial literacy training, accessible and healthy foods, and community service, our students will this year get to partner with Shepherd’s Hope and St. Luke’s United Methodist Church in filling food prescriptions. Clients that don’t have healthcare and suffer from obesity, high cholesterol, diabetes, etc. will receive a food prescription, have it filled, and join classes on how to grow, cook, and eat the produce all on the same block!

Our plants can grow teens in so many ways, but not without your help. We can impact our community’s future harvest by what we invest in today. In order to develop young leaders into a future where their potential can be realized, there needs to be little in the way of formal, structured preparation. Click here to help us grow our program in East Winter Garden and meet the demands of opportunity and experience for our youth today!

We’d like to give a big Grow Orlando shout out to Elijah Torres, our program’s first graduate!

One of our young entrepreneurs, Elijah Torres, has completed all of the graduation criteria and received his High School Diploma from Jones High School! Elijah was at crucial junction in his life, and his options weren’t looking good. He was a man with a troubled past when he was allowed to finally join our program, but when he picked up a shovel, he never looked back!

We started this program to help students like Elijah find their passion and direction in life.

This summer, he plans on working towards being a certified Grow Orlando Food Entrepreneur, and will continue to grow into a happy, healthy and empowered Orlando citizen.

Ladybugs are great insects that love to eat garden pests! Instead of spraying chemicals to remove our problem pests the students released ladybugs inside the greenhouse and got to see a natural (and very effective!) form of pest control. We’re always working hard to limit pest problems and sometimes it can feel like a full-time job. Insects such as aphids, caterpillars, and grasshoppers can do catastrophic damage inside micro-farms, but we don’t like to look at them as pests, but rather as parts of an intricate ecosystem that must be managed with bio-mimicry techniques.

Yes ladies and gentlemen, the Garden of the Tigers Tomato Patch is complete. Each student raised their own tomato plant inside the greenhouse then successfully transplanted them into the Tomato Patch. All the plants survived the transplanting phase and now the nutrient dense tomatoes are on their way!

The students successfully planted an avocado tree in the Garden of the Tigers. It was the first tree they planted at the Jones High School living laboratory. They learned how to dig a proper hole and give the tree enough space to grow. “It seemed harder before anyone showed me,” Deion, a current student at Jones High, said, “after Mr. Frank explained it to me, was like ‘I got this.’” Together with his classmates, Semaj and Marquis, Deion planted the first avocado tree at Jones High School.